by Michael Liss

How do you raise kids in an increasingly harsh and atonal world?  

We all have our templates for seeking harmony. Mine were my own parents. They were not performing artists or even musicians; neither played an instrument (I think the kazoo doesn’t qualify), and neither could sing. But, as listeners, they were virtuosos. Classical, of course, but also big band and swing, boogie-woogie and jazz, klezmer, folk and protest songs. My father even harbored a secret passion for some pretty hardcore mountain music—the real thing, serious pickin’ and fiddlin’ without the Nashville gloss. My sister and I think he gave this up, along with drinking and smoking, when he met my mother.

Then, there was opera. I’ve written before about being tied to a chair in the Orchestra section of the old Met when my legs were still too short to make it all the way to the floor. It was all true: I saw Tosca jump off the parapet, and Madame Butterfly do herself in, and Mimi tragically pass, and Violetta tragically pass, and Radames and Aïda jointly and severally tragically pass, and Baron Scarpia and Don Giovanni not-so-tragically pass. All that passing was inescapable; to quote Bugs Bunny in the towering “What’s Opera Doc?” (as even he passed, a victim of Elmer’s spear and magic helmet), “What did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?” 

In retrospect, I should have been honored that my parents had such confidence in my emotional stability that they felt assured I could cope with all that passing. In the moment, however, I don’t think it ever entirely registered with me, especially since all the adults would then cheer wildly. Brava, she’s dead? Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked over and who cannot fight back. For example, consider:

Students request that there be a bar on the college campus for informal gatherings and receptions. The administration opposes the bar because they “refuse to subsidize student bacchanalia.”

The problem here is that the request for a bar, even from college students, is not identical to a call for wild, destructive drinking binges. The administration has constructed a straw man of the students’ request.

The straw man fallacy comes in a variety of forms. These range from the standard version captured in the case above, to the selectional weak man, the hollow man, and the iron man. However, a unique kind of straw man is perpetrated when one creates a pastiche of distortions of one’s dialectical opponent – it is not composed simply of a single distortion, but rather a slew of mischaracterizations bent on representing one’s opponents in the worst light. We call this the burning man. In deploying the burning man fallacy, one not only stuffs an opposing figure with straw, but then proceeds to surround it with more tinder and additional flammable material, with the intention of committing the view at issue to the flames, along with whole traditions, movements, and ways of thinking. Read more »

by Paul Braterman                                                                                    

20^th-century creationism and racism

Henry Morris, founding father of modern Young Earth creationism, wrote in 1977 that the Hamitic races (including red, yellow, and black) were destined by their nature to be servants to the descendants of Shem and Japheth. Noah was inspired when he prophesied this (Genesis 9:25-27) [1]. The descendants of Shem are characterised by an inherited religious zeal, those of Japheth by mental acumen, while those of Ham are limited by the “peculiarly concrete and materialistic thought-structure inherent in Hamitic peoples,” which even affects their language structures. These innate differences explain the success of the European and Middle Eastern empires, as well as African servitude.

All this is spelt out in Morris’s 1977 book, The Beginning of the World, most recently reprinted in 2005 (in Morris’s lifetime, and presumably with his approval), and available from Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.

Morris is no fringe figure. On the contrary, he, more than any other individual, was responsible for the 20^th-century invention of Young Earth “creation science”. He was co-author of The Genesis Flood, which regards Noah’s flood as responsible for sediments worldwide, and founded the Institute of Creation Research (of which Answers in Genesis is a later offshoot) in 1972, serving as its President, and then President Emeritus, until his death in 2006.

Nor was this a personal aberration. As we shall see, he was heir to a strong tradition of creationist racism, of which he never managed to rid himself.

Strong accusations require strong evidence. I have therefore included as an Appendix some relevant passages from The Beginning of the World, quoting at length to avoid any risk of misrepresentation. Read more »

Rana Begum. No. 814. Frieze, London, 2018.

More here, here, and here.

by Tim Sommers

Sometime in the near future I hope you will find yourself in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Sydney, Detroit or Portland in a music venue, a theater space, or a bookstore attending a “storyslam”. They happen in at least 25 cities in at least 4 countries and attendance varies from under a hundred people to several hundred people. Many, probably the bulk, are associated with The Moth organization – which sponsors many other events including an NPR Radio Hour featuring stories (often from slams). First-Person Arts in Philadelphia has its own large and lively scene – and there are many smaller organizations and slams elsewhere, including, for example, Chicago’s Story Club. And there are many more out there in bars and pubs and bookstores. In the era of New Media, storytelling – maybe, the oldest media of all – is making a comeback.

Most storyslams follow some version of the Moth’s basic template. A theme is announced and advertised well ahead of time. Themes I have heard include Walls, Envy, Love Hurts, Detour, Heat, Magic, and Public Transportation. The night of the slam wanna-be storytellers put their names in a bag or a box or a hat. There’s a host (usually a stand-up comedian or a storyteller), often a musical guest, and the host pulls names out of the hat over the course of the night and these random strangers make their way through the darkened space to a bright stage with a mic and they tell you a story for around five minutes.

If you are the storyteller, you are supposed to tell a story that is true, about you, and relatively short. No one facts check, of course. Usually, you are judged, however. But not, you know, in a very judgey way. Unlike comedy open mic nights which tend to be brutal, storyslam crowds are warm and supportive – in an NPRish kind of way. And there’s no prize. Art, Nietzsche would tell you, just needs to be judged. Plus, many of the slams have grandslams at the end of the year featuring all of the winning storytellers from earlier slams telling stories on a new theme. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections of blackouts, travel restrictions and patriotic songs on the radio had become a distant memory for me until the moment I found myself stranded in Karachi due to airspace closure and witnessed not just military crossfire but that of the media of the two countries. The outbursts on news channels, as well as social media were interspersed with slogans and songs. One Indian patriotic song in particular, a ghazal by Allama Iqbal who is known as Pakistan’s national poet, sung not only in the voices of India’s celebrity singers and sweet-faced schoolchildren, but also adapted to their military march tune, caught my attention.

As in other places and other times of conflict, it was clear that words may serve not only as symbols of sovereignty and to cement the bond of nationhood, but can become veritable weapons aimed at the enemy. The media’s language of posturing and propaganda, all too familiar in both countries, saw a marked shift in Pakistan due to the tone set by Prime Minister Khan. In his critically-timed address to the nation, he was neither glib nor incendiary; his sentiments about the loss of life in the Pulwama bombing (claimed by a terrorist group in Pakistan) were heartfelt and expressed at length, his words were measured, dignified, and backed by a genuine spirit of peace. In contrast, the election-fevered Indian premier Modi’s yelling matches continued, as did his media’s angry sloganeering. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Thomas Manuel

“The last time there was a protest in this country, they didn’t just arrest everyone – they killed the protestors and carried on killing for weeks after. Ever since then, people here have been very afraid.” “When was this?” I asked. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he said, “and they killed thousands.” – Lara Pawson, The 27 May in Angola: a view from below

It’s simultaneously sotto voce and hyper-visible. – Marissa Moorman, The battle over the 27th of May in Angola

“Sita Maria Dias Valles …remains, for all intents and purposes, missing. Her body was never returned to her family. She was about to turn 26 when she was executed.” – Leonor Figueiredo, Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death

If stories have shapes, this one lies over the sphere of the Earth like a triangle. The three vertices or points of this triangle lie on three different continents: one in India, one in Angola and one in Portugal. But the lines that join these points, that form these vertices, traverse not just space but time.

Goa, India

In the 16^th century, Afonso de Albquerque attacks Goa and captures it from the Muslim king who ruled it. Goa becomes the capital of the Portuguese maritime operations in Asia. Through this tiny land, the riches and rarities of South East Asia traveled to Europe. It remained like this for four and a half centuries.

In 1947, the country of India gained its independence and threw off the grasping hands of the British Empire but the Portuguese held on to Goa with a deathly grip. The Salazar regime did not hesitate to shoot and kill Goans who agitated for independence.

In 1961, the Indian army marched into Goa and claimed the land. (In the process, they destroyed a Portuguese frigate named after Afonso de Albquerque. That is the nature of history.) The US and the UK would try to condemn the invasion in the United Nations but the then USSR would veto it. Read more »

by Katrin Trüstedt

In a Palazzo in Palermo, a video installation of a moving digital map of the sea traces the disappearance of a migrant ship. With this installation, the project Forensic Oceanography makes visible what is – even from this Palazzo, facing the Mediterranean Sea – usually removed from sight.

The figure of the migrant is, according to Thomas Nail, the political figure of our time, and this century will be the century of the migrant. In his book Nail traces the long history of migration, to question the notion of the nation state – in fact historically a fairly recent idea. Understood as a stable and organic, self-reproducing and self-sustaining whole, this notion tends to cast migrants as abnormalities and exceptions.^[1] Instead, the figure of the migrant, the stateless, and the refugee should be seen as the defining figures for our time, as writers from Hannah Arendt^[2] to Thomas Nail have suggested. With much more climate change migration to be expected, this figure can only become more crucial. While appearing quite prominently in political discourse as a problem, the migrant has remained in many other ways still unseen. It is this peculiar status of the figure of the migrant that “Forensic Oceanography” highlights in Palermo, as both excluded and included in European politics and discourse. Read more »

Frederica Krueger turned 14 a couple of days ago and this is her birthday portrait.

by Adele A Wilby

In this world of divisive and indeed, not infrequently, ugly politics, particularly in the United States under the present administration, and the British pursuit of an exit from the European Union, any opportunity for finding relief from the ‘angst’ of day to day politics is to be welcomed. The reading of Peter Wohlleben’s The Mysteries of Nature Trilogy: The Hidden Life of Trees, The Secret Network of Nature and The Inner Life of Animals provided me with such an opportunity.

Wohlleben draws on his twenty years as a government forester, and then manager of his own environmentally friendly forest in Germany, and his scientific knowledge, to share with us his experience of the inter-related, yet complex lives of a myriad of life forms in the plant and animal worlds. The result is a joy to read.

Each of his books can be read, and appreciated, in their own right, but collectively they amount to what is, in effect, how Wohlleben relates to and the respect he has for all life forms that constitute nature. The trilogy is successful, in my view, for the way he makes accessible to us his experience of working with nature, moderated by a judicious use of biological jargon. However, it is also his use of personification in his exposition of his subjects that makes it possible for the reader to realise just how integrated are the lives of all living creatures. The books are for people like me who do not have the time to take up the environment and the biological sciences as new disciplines to study, but are nonetheless interested in the natural world amidst which we live. In reading these texts we are provided with sufficient knowledge to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the natural world, and to wet our appetite to learn more about the subjects. Read more »

by Niall Chithelen

Throughout the film Late Spring (1949), the protagonist, Noriko, hides her emotions behind smiles. She smiles when happy, of course, but does so also through moments we know must be uncomfortable or sad. We take special notice, then, of the few moments in which Noriko’s face truly falls. She cannot smile through the news that her father, with whom she was living contentedly, might be remarrying. Once it seems her living situation will no longer be viable, Noriko agrees reluctantly to get married herself. On the day of her wedding, she sits, tentative in her finery, when her father comes to visit and compliments her. She smiles at him and then looks to the floor and her expression fades.

We might, as one film scholar does, see Noriko’s smiling as a sign she is a “modern girl” (moga). The film was made during the American occupation of Japan, and with the occupation and the postwar moment came cultural changes, new models and advertisements, fashionable women bearing congenial smiles. There are elements of Noriko’s life that suggest a certain modern-ness; she is wary of marriage, her professional skills are such that the work she used to do for her father Shukichi is now taken up by his Western-suited assistant, she wears Western-style clothing and has bobbed hair, she likes Gary Cooper, and she always seems to be smiling. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

In the next couple of months two of the largest democracies in the world—India and Indonesia—will have their national elections. At a time when democracy is under considerable pressure everywhere, the electoral and general democratic outcome in these two countries containing in total more than one and a half billion people (more than one and a half times the population in democratic West plus Japan and Australia) will be closely observed.

Let’s start with India. Many Indians, while preening about their country being the largest democracy, are often in denial about how threadbare the quality of that democracy actually has been, particularly in recent years. Indian elections are vigorous (barring some occasional complaints about intimidations and irregularities) and largely competitive (the Indian electorate is usually more anti-incumbent than, say, the American). But other essential aspects of democracy—respect for basic civic and human rights and established procedures of accountability in day-to-day governance—are quite weak. (I don’t like the oxymoronic term ‘illiberal democracy’, used by many people—from Fareed Zakaria to Viktor Orban—as this ignores those essential aspects of democracy).

In India (as in Indonesia) democracy is often mis-identified with a kind of crude majoritarianism. The Hindu nationalists which currently rule India often trample on minority rights with shameless impunity. They have created an atmosphere of hateful violence and intimidation against dissidents and minorities, where freedom of expression by artists, writers, scholars, journalists and others is routinely violated. Supposed “group rights” trump individual rights: individual freedom of expression has very little chance if some group claims to take offence. Courts sometimes take redemptive action, usually with great delay, but meanwhile the damage is done in intimidating large numbers of people. Read more »

I’m Listening to Something

I’m listening to something.
I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin.
It’s a tune Alexa pulled
from the high-capacity byte magazine
of her small black canister
which sits under a lamp upon a table
against the wall (where most of us have spent
at least a little time, in a sweat)
its power umbilical plugged to an outlet,
its invisible wireless wire
stretched taut to a router
its bluesy halo perfectly apropos—
but whatever song this is, it is necessarily of the moment
—and I had asked, after all, for classical,
so maybe Alexa knows more than I
of what this moment must consist

Of what it partially consists are sounds of bells
—not bells really but the closest thing
Chopin could come up with
to be played on something
that sounds bell-like but which (again)
I admit: I haven’t a clue.

Despite having a poet’s surfeit of words
you’d think I would’ve surveyed my ground
before committing to a page, but it’s just
spontaneous magic as I sit here
among Chopin’s luscious frequencies listening,
applying Chopin to the day’s doing,
wondering why Alexa has now, unexpectedly,
shuffled Ahmad Jamal into the mix,
wondering what Ahmad’s poignant,
corazón-filled jazz has
to do with
what this very now
surely is

Jim Culleny
10/15/17

Prabhakar Kolte. Untitled, 2005.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here, and here.

by Brooks Riley